Edited Book Chapter

Title: 'Fool’d with Hope, Men favour the Deceit,’ or, Can we Trust in Trust?Year: 2003Author Seivers, B.Abstract:

The importance of trust is heavily emphasized in contemporary organization
theory and management practice. Although I am convinced that trust is a good
thing and a necessary constituent of the social fabric, I am interested in
understanding the social (and political) thinking underlying the current
academic and non-academic view of trust. My working hypothesis is that
management attempts to engineer trust reflect an underlying denial of the loss
of hope regarding both the relatedness between organizational members and
the value and meaning of organizations. The experience of non-relatedness and
lack of trust cannot be acknowledged by management, therefore the loss of
hope has to be hidden behind the propagation of the importance of trust (and
relatedness). The denial of the loss of hope is an expression of psychotic
thinking concomitant with the inability to see reality and to mourn loss. The
engineered propagation of trust thus becomes a substitute for trust itself.